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Recovering unsaved or modified scripts

Let’s face it we have all spent countless hours developing and/or polishing up our sql scripts deep into the wee hours of the night to the point of near exhaustion. We rise early the next morning (or a few hours later in most cases), pour a cup of coffee and head over to our laptop to find that our system rebooted. Then reality sinks in and you suddenly realize that you didn’t save anything before calling it a night. Now you’re thinking “[enter swear phrase of choice here]”!

Don’t panic…

Typically when you re-open SQL Server Management Studio you’re prompted with a nice little screen that politely asks if you would like to recover the selected files or queries. Which is extremely helpful, but what happens when you don’t get that prompt, what then?

The answer is easy enough and may require you to change your folder options to show hidden files and folders. In the event you find yourself in a similar situation simply navigate to (assuming you are running Windows 7) C:\Users\”[your username goes here]”\AppData\Local\Temp\ and look for files similarly named like the ones illustrated below.